A Goodbye to Grandma

A piece I wrote and read at my Grandma's memorial service in October, 2011.

Death is really strange.

It means you have to use the past tense when you talk about someone, even though they still—present tense—are really important to you.

Death makes you use words like “was” even though you are actively—present tensely—loving them very much.

I speak on behalf of my siblings when I say that the Erickson kids love their Grandma. They think she is incredible. (And you’ll excuse my mixing of tenses here. Past doesn’t feel right yet.)

Everyone here has a story, a piece of Olive, that if we all shared, would assemble a more complete picture of this amazing woman. My contribution is a perspective I share with five others in the room. We are the ones who were fortunate enough to get to call Olive “Grandma,” to call 8925 Buttonwood Lane “Grandma’s House.”

As Olive’s only grandchildren, we could tell by the way she looked at us that she thought we were pretty special kids. Better than your run-of-the-mill grandchildren, if you will. And the feeling was quite mutual. It’s easy to brag about a grandma who walks half a mile each way to check the mail, who’s backpacked to virtually all of the fire lookouts in the Northwest, who worked her way from Montana poverty to a master’s degree, defying the gender expectations of her time. We knew all along we had no ordinary grandma, not one of the sugary, fragile grandmothers you see on the Hallmark Channel. No, our grandma was intelligent, proud, and level-headed.

She wouldn’t fall over us with smootchie-poo emotions, that is not the Hull way, but Grandma loved us, always wanted to see more of us, and we all knew it, even when we lived on opposite coasts. To Grandma’s delight, some of us moved out to the Northwest for school, meaning we finally had a grandma nearby. And she rose to the challenge spectacularly.

In our school years on the West Coast, she went above and beyond what should ever be expected of a grandparent. She helped teach me how to drive, moved in me and out dorms, got me into the woods for hikes and infected me with a love for the smell of pine needles. She gave and gave with no mention of personal inconvenience.

Margaret remembers Grandma and Josie driving out to Seattle to see her on Thanksgiving weekend, bringing with them the Thanksgiving dinner she had missed due to work—15 Tupperware in all, to makes sure she didn’t miss out on a single side dish. She gave us family and a home away from campus anytime we asked for it, and in Margaret’s case, even when we didn’t!

Some people can’t relax at their grandma’s homes—too stuffy and formal. Some people also didn’t have Olive as their grandma. 8925 Buttonwood Lane is a place us Erickson kids will no doubt try to describe to our own children one day. We’ll talk about Grandma’s House, using that awful past tense, and it will probably sound like an Erickson family legend, something you’d have had to have lived to understand—the beach, the bridge over the gully, Kitty, the tap water that smelled like pickles, morning glories and blackberries lining a path down to the water, the smell of coffee and the sound of seals, Grandma’s rock-hard little cookies, the oh-so-blue living room carpet, the best tree swing in the history of tree swings. It felt authentically like home to us, which for a bunch of suburban slickers from Maryland, is saying something. Maybe a testament to the Pacific Northwest and some sort of biological conviction that we are actually from a place, despite our military transience, but I think more-so, our attachment to 8925 was a testament to the woman who lived inside it. The way she lit up with smiles and hugs when we came to visit. Her untiring hospitality and patience with us crazy kids deserves recognition, more than I could ever give here.

When we wreaked havoc in her home with our clumsy adolescent limbs, she didn’t see a pile of broken china. What she saw in front of her was a grandchild melting in fear and shame, a grandchild who needed reassurance.

In college I accidentally broke one of her antique butter dishes. Smashed its pretty lid to pieces on the floor. Grandma responded to my frantic blubberings with a clear, level voice, “Shannon.” I looked up at her. “Did anyone die?” she asked me. “…N..noo” “Alright then. It’s just a thing. I have lots of things.” What an incredible perspective my grandma had in these moments that would frustrate most others!

Nancy remembers coming upstairs from starting her laundry and asking Grandma innocently, “Is there a difference between detergent and bleach?” Realizing what Nancy had done, Grandma flew down the stairs and saved most of the clothes. But what stands out to Nancy about the incident wasn’t the close call with the bleach; it was Grandma’s complete lack of reproach. It was just a mistake. And Grandma gave us permission to make them.

There isn’t much that could faze our Montana wasteland-born grandma, least of all an accident or slight change of plans. Ralph’s favorite memory of time spent with her was when the power went completely out and they flushed the toilets with creek water and cooked their food over the fireplace for a day. What would have been an emergency for a delicate grandma ended up being an adventure with hot chocolate and pinochle by candlelight.

And, oh, you’ve never met a grandma with a sense of humor like Olive. Her humor was strategic and sharp, surprisingly dark even!

After sleeping in too late one morning, Nancy recalls waking up to Grandma at the door saying, “Just making sure you didn’t die.”

After she was diagnosed with cancer I remember sitting beside Grandma, while Josie and Delnora discussed the current round of medications at the other side of the kitchen table. After reading the label on one bottle of pills, Delnora lowered her voice and said to Josie, “This one is normally given for schizophrenia.” That’s not why Grandma was taking it of course, but Delnora had whispered the information to avoid embarrassing her, I think. I glanced at Grandma to see if she had heard, and—I’ll never forget this—with not even a hint of a smile, Grandma slowly winked at me. I snorted into my coffee.

She also gave us a dynamic example of a grandma who was both invested in the young lives and activities of her grandchildren (she came to every performance & recital she possibly could), but who also lived her own exciting life unapologetically, complete with global adventures and many good friends. There is no doubt; we have a grandma to live up to.

She raised our mother and is responsible for some of the qualities we love best in her, and in our family too. Indeed, it’s not a stretch to trace back my family’s love of reading and hiking, as two examples, straight to Grandma Olive.

From cooking tips in the kitchen, to our love of bird feeders in the backyard, she’s tied intrinsically into the fabric of this family. She is Grandma. So to even be standing here right now feels weird—too much past about someone who is so present.